Bekker's Blog

Live! 360 Preview: AI in the Spotlight

Artificial intelligence (AI) will come into focus at the Live! 360 conference for Microsoft-focused developers and IT professionals this week in Orlando, Fla.

Live! 360 brings together Converge360's events for one combined conference with each event as a track. (Editor's note: Converge360 is the parent company of Redmondmag.com.) In addition to Visual Studio Live!, SQL Server Live!, TechMentor, Office & SharePoint Live! and ModernApps Live!, this year the conference is rolling out an entire Artificial Intelligence Live! track.

"We are excited about the AI Live launch and how that ties in nicely with our overall program of incubating new topics at Live! 360 and giving the Live! 360 attendees the opportunity to broaden their educational reach and knowledge base by attending any sessions across the six events," said Brent Sutton, vice president of Converge360 Events.

Headlining the AI track is a Tuesday morning keynote from Pranav Rastogi, a program manager at Microsoft who focuses on making developers successful with AI. His keynote is "Enabling Enterprise Developers in AI -- How Microsoft is Doing It." AI has been a huge messaging push for Microsoft over the last year and a half, and Rastogi is expected to talk about Microsoft technologies that support AI projects, as well as how Microsoft is using the approaches internally and in customer implementations.

Andrew Brust, conference co-chair for the Artificial Intelligence Live! track, as well as for the Visual Studio and SQL Server tracks, says the Live! 360 AI content will reflect the conference's roots in giving developers practical guidance.

"Most of the AI conferences out there are really like data science conferences. We will have that content, but not only that. Because it's VS Live!, we will have content for developers [about AI bots and features]," Brust said. "It's AI aimed at developers rather than AI aimed at AI specialists."

One example of the type of content that Live! 360 specializes in is being run by Brust, and will cover new AI features that Microsoft has just integrated into Power BI and how to make use of those capabilities. Another is a workshop by experienced BI expert Jen Stirrup on how BI professionals can transition into AI.

The main technology keynote for all conference tracks is on Wednesday, when Donovan Brown, the Principal DevOps Manager at Microsoft's Cloud Developer Advocacy Team, presents on "Enterprise Transformation." The talk will focus on the transition of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services from a three-year waterfall delivery cycle to three-week iterations, open source elements and the Git Virtual File System.

Also Wednesday, James Montemagno, Microsoft Principal Program Manager in the Mobile Developer Tools unit, is scheduled to deliver an authoritative session on the future of .NET and Visual Studio.

Some of the other major technologies and themes being addressed by the more than 100 expert speakers this year include containers and the Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Cosmos DB, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, Windows Server 2019, Windows 10 updates, Microsoft Graph, Internet of Things (IoT) and Office 365 security.

Microsoft updated an August security advisory this week to urge organizations using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol in supported Windows systems to implement some configuration changes manually.